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Documentary film maker and photographer Jeremy Jeffs spent three years photographing and interviewing people with ME in their homes. Lives We Cannot Live reveals the hidden reality of living with the condition.Curated by Sebah Chaudhry and supported by the ME Association the exhibition sets out to bring visibility to a hidden and neglected community and encompasses environmental portraits collaged with diary notes and personal memories of before being ill selected from more than 50 cases.
Diagnosed with ME as a teenager Jeffs shares the lived experiences of his sitters and captures an intimate side of life rarely witnessed even by close friends. Hidden symptoms mixed with a general lack of awareness make this a doubly invisible and isolating disease.
“I started this project out of frustration and anger because in the almost four decades since my diagnosis nothing has really changed. We still don’t know much about ME there’s still a lack of proper funding for research no clear treatment and worse there’s still widespread misunderstanding about the illness even among some healthcare professionals.”
Around 400000 people in the UK have this debilitating and as yet incurable illness. Symptoms include profound fatigue sleep disturbance post-exertional malaise cognitive difficulties and a range of other symptoms like pain headaches nausea and intolerance to lights and noise.
Lives We Cannot Live is the first large scale project to focus on ME and precedes the publication of a photo book with Fistful of Books later this year.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Oxo Gallery, Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House St, London SE1 9PH, United Kingdom, London
